Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"The Puritans left England and crossed the Atlantic in the 1630s to construct what John Winthrop called a 'city on a hill,' an example to the rest of the world. The Puritans configured church and state so the two would be both coterminous and mutually reinforcing, but only one form of worship was permitted.

"Without question, Puritanism in 17th-century Massachusetts was a grand and noble vision, but it ultimately collapsed beneath its own weight, beneath the arrogance of its own pretensions. By the middle of the century, Puritanism had become ingrown and calcified, the founding generation unable to transmit its piety to its children. By the waning decades of the century, in the face of encroaching pluralism -- Anglicans and Quakers -- and the rise of a merchant class, the Puritan ministers of Massachusetts were making increasingly impassioned, frantic calls for repentance. What frightened them -- no less than the leaders of the religious right at the turn of the 21st century -- was pluralism.

"Despite the best efforts of the Puritan clergy, spirituality in New England continued to languish into the 18th century. The tide began to turn when fresher and more energetic preachers entered the scene in the 1730s. George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, Isaac Backus, and others challenged the cozy relationship between church and state and thereby reinvigorated religion in New England. The force of their ideas and their assault on the status quo spread throughout the Atlantic colonies in an utterly transformative event known as the Great Awakening.

"The lesson was clear. Religion functions best outside the political order, and often as a challenge to the political order. When it identifies too closely with the state, it becomes complacent and ossified, and efforts to coerce piety or to proscribe certain behavior in the interests of moral conformity are unavailing.

[...]

"From his post in Litchfield, Conn., Lyman Beecher resisted 'the fall of the standing order' in Connecticut. In 1820, however, a scant two years after Connecticut did away with state-subsidized religion [...] Beecher was forced to repent. Although he and his fellow Congregationalist ministers had feared 'that our children would scatter like partridges,' the effect of disestablishment was quite the opposite. 'Before we had been standing on what our fathers had done,' Beecher recalled in his autobiography, 'but now we were obliged to develop all our energy.' After disestablishment, he wrote, 'there came such a time of revival as never before.'"

-- Randall Balmer, "Jesus Is Not a Republican", The Chronicle of Higher Education 2006-06-23 (Volume 52, Issue 42, Page B6; section "The Chronicle Review"). (Thanks to twistedchick for linking to it. Bold emphasis added by me, underline emphasis is from the original.)